Better Care Fund no more than a “ruse” to cover up funding pressures, say MPs

Funding arrangements for integrating health and social care in England were a “complicated ruse” designed to “paper over the funding pressures on adult social care,” MPs have said in a report.1

Meg Hillier, chair of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, which produced the report, described the Better Care Fund as a “money merry go round.” She told The BMJ that “one off short term initiatives [such as the Better Care Fund] were not a way to solve long standing problems” such as improving health and social care in the …